Prologue

Monday, January 30, 2012

J'Accuse: Where Is MY Rocket-Powered Jet Pack, Mr. Gingrich?!!!

Well, haven't we all been treated to quite the show lately? Of course I'm talking about the debates for the Republican Party's primary in Florida, which have degenerated into an unseemly picking over the corpse of Reagan-era optimism, each candidate trying to prize from Zombie Ronnie's rigor mortised grasp the famed Talisman of Americana. Shameful and disgusting.

The mind readily grasps the allure of laying claim to the mantle of the august Uncle Dutch (i.e., being the only legitimate basis of rule, the "One Meme to Rule Them All"). Therefore it is hardly surprising that its power should attract the devious lust of unsavory creatures from beneath even the dankest rocks in the even the darkest corners of America's mushroom garden. That is merely natural and expected, actually a necessary function of narrative causality, being all the better to highlight by means of contrast the enlightened munificence and nobility of the True Heir of the king who single-handedly defeated the corrosive and perverse troglodytes of The Evil Empire. What is unbearable is to see how far you have fallen from thine birthright, oh Padawan. Woefully are we disappointed in thee, Newt Skywalker!

Where is my rocket-powered jet pack, Mr. Gingrich?!!!

I and millions of others just like me came of age in the waning days of the Soviet Union and were raised on the promise of unlimited horizons in the new frontier that was supposed to supplant the forces of monolithic evil. Loyal soldiers of the Cold War we were, instilled daily with the knowledge that our confrontations with wily machinations of pencil-pushing bureaucrats must necessarily be crowned with eventual success, our manly revolutionary virtues being altogether unstoppable by the feeble, crippled imaginations of pallid, apparatchik eunuchs hiding behind the skirt of an effeminate and decadent Socialism. It was a heady, romantic time of dreams and ambition, all fuelled by the unique vision that only you and Ronald Reagan could conjure in the American imagination. Don't pretend that it wasn't you who inspired Moonraker, Mr. Gingrich, my generation's Beowulf. It's no use in pretending otherwise.

Yet here we are today in 2012, living in the world that you and my generations' heroes made, a world very different from the sleek futuristic glamour promised us by the Hollywood visions like Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome and Blade Runner. We have a housing market with demand worse than that seen at the nadir of the Great Depression, and plagued by the locusts of foreclosure, fat on the rancid feed of robo-signed title documents crafted by the very devils you told us had been vanquished when the Berlin Wall fell.

Were we perhaps expecting too much of one man, Mr. Gingrich? Was your venture into the belly of the beast merely a standard literary trope, part of the proto-typical heroic cycle of Call/Answer/Confrontation/Setback that serves to heighten the dramatic tension before you recoup and sally forth to eventually defeat the dragon? Perhaps so. Perhaps so.